BLACK HISTORY: Slavery in Massachusetts and the long fight for civil rights

Massachusetts has been identified with liberty and freedom since the days of the Pilgrims and the Revolutionary War. But the area’s racial history has its dark sides, too, from founding families that owned slaves to churches that segregated their pews.

Massachusetts has long been identified with liberty and freedom since the days of the Pilgrims and the Revolutionary War. But the state’s racial history has its dark sides, too, from founding families that owned slaves to churches that segregated their pews.

Here is a look at some of the influential figures and forgotten events of the first two centuries of the long path from Colonial slavery to the the Civil Rights Movement to the election of Milton resident Deval Patrick as the state’s first African-American governor in 2006.

1641

Slavery legal in Massachusetts

Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first British colony to legalize slavery. That law extended to the Plymouth Colony in 1691, when the two colonies merged.

Local founding families who owned slaves included Judge Isaac Winslow and his wife, Sarah Wensley Winslow, who lived in an estate off what is now Route 139 in Marshfield. In a 1783 ruling, Massachusetts Chief Justice William Cushing of Scituate found slavery to be illegal in the state.

1760

‘Slave author’ Britton Hammon

Hammon, a slave owned by Judge Winslow’s son, General John Winslow, found his way to freedom but willingly returned to servitude in Marshfield.

In 1747, he got his master’s permission to go to sea. His ship was captured by Indians off the Florida coast, and he was imprisoned in Cuba. He escaped, took a British ship to England and lived there until the late 1750s, when he returned to Marshfield after a happenstance meeting in London with Winslow.

Page 2 of 3 - Hammon published his memoirs in 1760, making him one of the first African-American authors in the colonies.

1792

The ‘Colony of New Guinea’

Freed as a reward for fighting for the patriots during the Revolutionary War, former slaves Prince Goodwin, Cato Howe, Quomony Quash and Plato Turner were given land grants by the town of Plymouth, near the Kingston town line and just south of the current Route 80.

They called their settlement the Colony of New Guinea, but it became known as Parting Ways. The graves of all four men are in a small cemetery plot there. Efforts to open a museum nearby have foundered over the years.

1799

John Adams supports Haitian revolt against France

As tensions with Napoleon’s France simmered, America’s second president dispatched two warships in support of an anti-French slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

L’Ouverture was in effective control of the colony by then, after eight years of fighting, but was challenged by a pro-French rebel faction. Adams supported L’Ouverture against that group.

Adams was almost a century ahead of his time. Haiti didn’t declare independence until 1804, and the U.S. didn’t officially recognize what was known as “the black republic” until 1862.

1835

Hingham women form anti-slavery society

The movement for black freedom was still new when Rhoda Beal, Evelina Smith, Mary and Elizabeth Lincoln, and others at the town’s Baptist church organized the Hingham Female Anti-Slavery Society. The group pledged to use “all Christian and pacific means for the abolition of American slavery.”

They were the first such group on the South Shore. In 1838, they merged with an all-male society, and by the late 1840s, the group was a force in the town, staging a parade in 1846 and publishing the songbook “Anti-Slavery Melodies” a year later.

1841

Lucretia Leonard integrates the ‘white pews’

Like other churches, New North Congregational in Hingham had separate pews for blacks in the rear of the church. Some Sundays, Lucretia Leonard was the only African-American woman there. A mulatto who grew up in North Carolina, she worked as a domestic servant for three spinster sisters: Eliza, Katy and Anna Thaxter.

When the Plymouth County Anti-Slavery Society voted against church segregation in 1841, the Thaxter sisters invited Leonard to join them on their front-row pew – with the support of the church’s new pastor, the Rev. Oliver Stearns.

Some parishioners threatened to leave, but the sisters said they would worship from the church porch if Leonard wasn’t allowed to sit with them. She did and outlived them all. When Leonard died in 1904, she was mourned as a town icon.

1841

Page 3 of 3 - John Quincy Adams defends the Amistad Africans

In 1839, a group of west Africans bound for slavery in Spanish Cuba took over their captors’ ship and landed off Long Island.

The U.S. government took the case to federal court to settle the question: Since the Mendi tribe members hadn’t been sold into slavery, were they then free to go home? Lower courts had already ruled they were free to return home when former president and Congressman John Quincy Adams defended them before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld previous rulings, the Mendi went home, and Adams became a hero of the anti-slavery movement – and an object of hatred among Southern slave owners.

1842

Rev. Samuel May loses his pulpit

In 1836, the uncle of “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was hired as the pastor of First Parish Church in Norwell, which then was part of Scituate. The congregation knew he was an abolitionist, but his views apparently proved to be too liberal for them. He was fired after six years.

1846-65

Island Grove anti-slavery rallies

Now an Abington park and Civil War memorial, the wooded, pond-side grove drew thousands to annual gatherings held by Boston activist William Lloyd Garrison. Celebrity speakers included former slaves Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. Sometimes locals who didn’t support the cause heckled and disrupted the rallies.

In 2003, the 35-acre park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

1866

Bethel AME Church founded in Plymouth

The South Shore’s only African Methodist Episcopal church was organized soon after the Civil War, in a town and area that has never had a large African-American population.

Over the decades, visitors have included jazz singer Billie Holiday and comedian-activist Dick Gregory, who has lived in Plymouth since 1973. The Rev. Peter Gomes, now the nationally known minister at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, worshipped as a child there with his mother.